Blue
by jinlian
Summary: "Idiot pupil," Hiko mumbles, "you will never learn as you are that fire is life—it sustains us in the winter, it cooks our food, it warms our drink. What you only see is fear." (A:TLA AU)


The fire he holds cupped in his hands is tenuous, urged to life with only a few warm breaths as it struggles, barely red with heat, to lick its many tongues across his palms. For this, Hiko hardly spares a glance, wiping an arm across a chin sticky with sake before he pours himself another cup. "Idiot pupil," Hiko mumbles, "you will never learn as you are that fire is life—it sustains us in the winter, it cooks our food, it warms our drink. What you only see is fear."

Kenshin thinks of the yellow that roared its way across the night sky when the slavers came; he thinks of the bursts of heat that reddened his cheeks when they died, when his hands could only shield his face until Hiko stood alone before him, crowned by the pinks and yellows of the sun that died against the horizon and the tinted view of a child. He thinks that perhaps, had his hands known what they could do sooner, none of those fires might have risen so high, in the end—instead of the blood and dirt of his companions' graves, his hands could have held theirs still warm from the fire that he breathed.

_Fire is life,_ he repeats to himself, _and from here, I will save it._

* * *

Katsura says that it is no matter that Kenshin has never used his firebending to kill; with skill like his, he will learn, soon enough. Kenshin grips the rough weave of his hakama and says nothing.

With the Avatar only recently dead, passed into her next life, it is the time for revolution: he knows this. He believes this. People cannot be slaves to their government. And this is what Kenshin repeats to himself when the smell of his first kill in the name of revolution fills his mouth and his lungs, scratches at his throat until it forces its way back from his stomach and into the bushes along the road. It is life he is freeing in the end. But the smoke and the stench burns itself into his nose, and it is what he smells every night until exhaustion wears at him and he sinks into temporary blackness.

This lessens, at least a little, when Tomoe drapes a blanket around his shoulders in his sleep.

He regrets, when he curls into her the first time, waking to fire in his hands throwing stark relief onto the pallor of her face until something, he realized, was different—until he realized that nothing tickled the roof of his mouth and churned in his stomach because something else, a sweetness that had nothing to do with burning or the heavy grey of smoke, rested on his tongue instead. _White plums. _Kenshin presses his lips to the back of her neck and breathes, _full_ breaths, his chest swelling against her before he lets it go.

It's a wonder to him at times that Tomoe does not bend, because the things she touches bend nonetheless. He watches her hand move over the pages of her journal, the easy flicks of her fingers as she weaves the baskets he will use to deliver medicine to the village, the snow that draws quiet around her shoulders as she lies motionless on the ground.

By then he can no longer smell the white plums that drove out the madness when she was near. The smell of flesh and burning hair now fills his lungs so thick and heavy that he _cannot breathe._ The red that drips hot from his face is nothing against the black that covers his hands, and no matter how much snow he presses to his lips he cannot rid himself of the rot on his tongue. And yet despite the flames that leap higher from the house in which she lay only moments before, still in the snow she only pales, and Kenshin realizes that _fire cannot create a new world, it can only destroy an old one._

* * *

Her eyes are blue, sharp as she narrows them against the sweat that threatens to drip from her forehead as she rolls the water in her hands through each careful form. Kenshin looks down instead at the water into which _his_ are plunged: warm, soaking the ends even of the kimono sleeves he has tied back. Water washes clean. In this, nothing moves with his touch, and he is pleased.

He does not understand her talks of idealism, of a bending that does not heal and yet protects. It's the naive words of an innocent, for bending inevitably turns to destruction; yet when he watches her, the slow shifts of her weight back onto her heels and the bends and embrace of her arms, he almost believes that one day her ideal can become reality.

"Kaoru-dono is working hard this morning," he says.

She is not sharp when she looks at him.

She takes easily to the bodies that fill her dojo without request, and she becomes, before they know it, home far more than the roof is. Kenshin doesn't quite know why he stays, other than that he is weary; somehow, her home becomes a draw for memories in the flesh from ten years earlier, and she is wrapped up in the shrieks of enemies and bloodbending that stops her lungs until she is the one to douse him from his rage. And still Kenshin stays—because "I know there is more," she whispers, hoarse as she struggles to regain her breath even lying as she is in his arms, "more to you than this," because Kaoru knows that it is because of Kenshin she can still protect her home at all.

But it is, as he should have known, only so long before a past can no longer be outrun; and Kenshin leaves before she must run from it, too.

* * *

Her eyes are blue, lit against the dying coals of the hearth as she stares at him from across Hiko's tiny hut. For the first time he sees nothing in them but ice, nothing soft until she meets him two nights later on the roof of the Aoiya. He is angry with her, he tells her, but does not say (though he knows it) that she is the one with the right to be angry; and she reaches for his hands. Kaoru uncurls them in his lap, spreads his fingers palms-up until they rest, hers flat against his. Her hands, like his, are calloused, and she does not mention the too-pink skin of the burns along his hands and wrists. Instead she is silent, though he waits for her to speak, and while he waits his fingers twitch beneath hers, warmed by her touch and her closeness in the evening chill.

_Warmth,_ Kenshin thinks, and when smoke rises from the breath he releases when Kaoru's grip shift once more—linked between his, nails scratching, gently, the backs of his hands—he is not afraid. And as Sano hauls him later away from Shishio's burning corpse, it is for Kaoru who through the shifting blackness of his consciousness he lifts an arm and reaches.

_A bending that does not heal, but protects—_Kenshin will laugh about this later. He does not laugh, of course, when just when thinks he might learn to understand, Enishi teaches him he will never be free _(the smell should never have visited the dojo—of burning wood and charred bodies, of the blackened figure that twisted, grotesque, left on the front door, her blue ribbon tossed in mocking over her body, rippling satin despite the soot-ruined edges, and still, he thinks, he can see it move between her hands). _But he will laugh after Tsubame's voice pulls him from a muted world of grey, when she pleads not for revenge but for _help_, and for her he can stand once more. He will laugh as he drops to his knees when Kaoru stands between him and Enishi, when he has nothing left but she binds his wrists, ice too cool against the heightened nerves of his body, and Enishi no longer moves but for the gasping of a name.

"You are cold," Kaoru whispers to Kenshin, below deck on the ship home; and fire blooms in the hand she cradles close to her chest.

"I am warm," he murmurs in response. She's a waterbender who heals, after all.


End file.
